Lightning Bolt is helping build a sustainable and tangible sense of community safety in Oakland by facilitating trainings for small businesses free of cost. These are the common spaces we participate in and utilize in our day-to-day lives, so it follows that these are the spaces that can help defend and nurture our communities as they become sites of skilled preparedness.

We are networked with long-time community experts in transformative justice, disaster relief, and proactive defense from political crises that target our more precarious Oaklanders in the margins of society. Because we value these important skill sets, we recognize that paying our trainers is a material way of showing our support and appreciation for the heroic work they do for Oakland. To compensate them for their labor of love, we ask that folks donate to our upcoming training November 13th so that we can afford to pay them for their time and effort.

We thank you for your time and support for an Oakland that is evermore ready for the future!

Absolutely. Here are just three ways — please feel free to add more in comments.

1. White people probably don’t have to worry about being arrested and deported from an emergency shelter.

Fear of racial profiling, arrest, and deportation is giving some undocumented immigrant families (you know, the types that white County Sheriffs say “look illegal”) second thoughts about seeking emergency shelter and resources. And because farmworkers rely on fleeting harvest opportunities for their paychecks, some are even trying to keep picking fruit amidst the toxic smoke, increasing their risk of exposure. If you’d like to help support undocumented communities, check out the UndocuFund — for fire relief in Sonoma County.

2. Indigenous communities — whose knowledge of safe forest burning has long been ignored or suppressed — will not be eligible for federal aid.

The U.S. government itself acknowledges that colonization has suppressed indigenous knowledge of how to burn forests properly. These deliberate forms of burning have been used for millennia to strategically tend the landscape and prevent spontaneous lightning fires. (Check out this video for an example from the Mono people of Central California.)

Thanks to 83 generous people in and out of California, we succeeded in getting 300 P-grade masks for houseless folks in Oakland. THANK YOU!!! With this first shipment going to tent encampments in West and downtown Oakland (via Feed the People), we’re now starting a 2nd Lightning Round for East Oakland encampments in need of relief.

Please help us raise $800 by Tuesday to purchase 60 – 100 high-quality P95 and P100 masks for houseless folks in East Oakland, to be distributed by the East Oakland Collective.*

Wildfires in the Northern San Francisco Bay area are raging. Many folks have lost their homes, and people all over the bay area are being affected by the smoke. Lightning Bolt is raising money to purchase P95-P100* masks for The Village and Feed the People in Oakland to distribute to houseless folks all over town. Everything donated here before NOON FRIDAY will go toward purchasing P95-P100 masks that will reach people over the next few days. THANK YOU!

Lightning Bolt is helping organize the community resource fair as part of the Stop Urban Shield Campaign SAFETY IS WITH COMMUNITY, NOT COPS. MILITARIZED POLICE DON’T CREATE SAFETY IN A DISASTER. Come out for the rally at 4 and the fair at 5, this coming Friday, Sept. 8 in Oakland.

Join Lightning Bolt for a day of Oakland Power Projects workshops, story-collecting and skill-building sessions to enhance community power to respond to healthcare needs and emergencies without police.

FREE and open to all community members. Lunch provided. Childcare is available on request – please contact us at powerprojects@criticalresistance.org.

In Alameda County, California, when you call 911, the first people to get dispatched are police. You can help people avoid getting harmed by police by not calling 911. Instead, you can call the Alameda County Fire & Medical Emergency Line, which will connect directly to the fire department and the paramedics, bypassing that first call to the police.

11 neighbors in the lefty Eastlake United for Justice group (EUJ) took a free 2.5-hour home safety and disaster preparedness class, CORE I, led by a lovely geologist named Jerry.

We want to improve our disaster readiness in light of the overdue earthquake anticipated to hit the San Francisco Bay Area any day now. This training covered a lot of ground — safety plans, evacuation strategies, gas and electric, water, food, and more. The basic premise is that we should be prepared, in the event of an earthquake or major disaster, to survive for 7 to 10 days with no running water, cell phones, or electricity.